291–300 of 341 posts
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In France, if you lay off people collectively for economical reasons, those people have the right to be re-hired first should the company open jobs that are compatible with their qualifications within 1 year after the layoff (it's called "re-hire priority").
Interesting. Is that a law or a typical contract term?
Usually there’s a layoff list with a timer.
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> but until a person’s salary exceeds the value they bring to a firm, there will be other firms willing to pay more and attract that talent This is false. Supply and demand is a factor. I could clean the toilets at the office, if janitors were in short supply my boss might setup a rotation schedule - nobody wants to but it must be done and so he would pay me. However because janitors are cheaper than me he doesn't. T…
I don't see the contradiction. Janitorial duties are at the very worst easy to train any person off the street for. As long as people need any sort of minimum wage to survive you can find a janitor. But that also means that, because minimum wage, your salary will almost never exceed the value brought to that business. Outside of some super crazy regulations of cleanliness.
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The play devil's advocate, presumably they're fired because they didn't meet standards (in whatever vague way they can justify) and they want foreign workers because local workers didn't meet those standards.
Parent's point was about lay-offs, not firings. I'm very comfortable with their suggestion. Make the company be explicit. If it's a firing ("they are underperforming") then sure, that doesn't affect H1B eligibility, but you have to actually fire them. If it is a layoff ("we don't need those jobs") then why are you turning around and hiring for them immediately afterwards?
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> The second mistake they made is assume that companies would prioritize being lean and trimming the mediocre & bottom 5%. There are other considerations, combined productivity is more important than having individual superstars working on the shiniest features. I'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about elsewhere – hiring is a goddamn mess right now. If I trim the bottom 5% of my org (in my case, 2-3 e…
I think the value of low performers becomes much more obvious when you separate out the concept of a toxic employee. Toxic employees hurt the team or organization whether low performing or high performing, and with rare exceptions it’s almost always worth getting rid of them. Toxic employees are the people getting into arguments and conflicts all the time, dragging others down constantly. Or they’re the managers who…
I’ve seen aspy nerds be the squeaky wheel (and very often be correct) in the long tradition of neuroatypical people who care more about an ideal than about fashionable niceties that fluctuate like hemlines called toxic way more often over the last few years. This is locally toxic in the sense that it can be temporarily disruptive until either the problem gets fixed or the aspy nerd gets fixed. But it’s in no way globally toxic: it never kills your business unless it’s one of two founders, and often saves your business from getting hit by an asteroid when the subject matter changes abruptly. Back when there was real competition at the apex of the software business you were cooked without those people around.
5-10 years ago Elon Musk was so popular in SV that people were buying up Teslas and posting every SpaceX launch and all but naming their kids after him. Today he’s anathema in huge parts of the Valley culture. Same guy, same behavior really. Good or bad? Eh, I don’t know, seems complicated.
Palmer Luckey was forced out of Meta for giving like eight grand to a conservative PAC, today he’s the darling of everyone with a family office.
Linux was built by a Linus that would call people “fucking brain damaged” on LKML, he’s mellowed but he built one of the longest-running and most successful engineering artifacts in all of human affairs acting in the “locally toxic, globally enlightened” mode.
The thing is that bad behavior at scale, bad behavior with real, lasting, irreversible consequences is almost never called toxic. This is the globally toxic behavior of those with power.
Transient words are routinely called toxic. This is the locally toxic, globally enlightened behavior of those with little.
This doesn’t seem like a word we use in a way that is either practically useful or morally sound.
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If you think you're not getting paid enough you should quit and start your own company. The fact that google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per employee is not proof that you're underpaid. The chef at French Laundry makes $$$$$$$, does that mean the apple farmer who supplied the apples for $ is underpaid?
> If you think you're not getting paid enough you should quit and start your own company. I'd rather eat a bullet, thanks. I have dignity and I'd like to keep it. > The fact that google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per employee is not proof that you're underpaid. That's exactly what it means. > The chef at French Laundry makes $$$$$$$, does that mean the apple farmer who supplied the apples for $ is underpaid? The chef is…
The newer shareholders provided liquidity to the original shareholders. Their benefit to society was helping to incentivize the people who created the company (and all the jobs) by making them rich.
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> The second mistake they made is assume that companies would prioritize being lean and trimming the mediocre & bottom 5%. There are other considerations, combined productivity is more important than having individual superstars working on the shiniest features. I'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about elsewhere – hiring is a goddamn mess right now. If I trim the bottom 5% of my org (in my case, 2-3 e…
Just as a curiosity, are those 2-3 people "underperformers" or simply "Not as high performers"? In an org that size I can imagine everyone pulls their weight, but there will simply be others who are inevitably more productive for a variety of reasons. >hiring is a goddamn mess right now. Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the hirees end, but how's it on the other side?
At the end of the day, all I care about is getting an acceptable level of output compared to pay from an employee who knows the business and isn't particularly fussy. So I'll try to find the path to get low performers upskilled, find what interests them, or find another role in the company that fits & do some horse trading. Or I'll let them coast and replace them when it's easier for me to hire.
>> hiring is a goddamn mess right now.
> Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the hirees end, but how's it on the other side?
Someone smarter than me might know the true answer. I've heard three compelling arguments:
* tons of companies were irrationally exuberant and overhired, cut roles, and now we're seeing the impact of those workers looking for new work
* increasing shareholder greed means running a threadbare team and driving the company into the ground is better than staffing appropriately if it means next quarter looks good
* most companies are big dumb herd animals and hey, if the big guys are downsizing, so should we
But even though the market is saturated, profitability is now king, so if I'm going to hire someone I need to have a compelling answer to finance saying "how does this new role guarantee us ROI?"
All I really know and can see is the knock-on effect: I posted the same role in 2022 and last month. In 2022, I had to recruit like crazy, to the point that I had external vendors placing below-average employees at above-average salaries. Last month I had the pleasure of sifting through 700 applications, and plenty were "pass: overqualified, won't stick around".
So it seems there are tons of people out there competing for fewer roles.
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> so you instead end up with indirect measurements that assume a Gaussian distribution. 100%. I was going to write something similar. > If you look at board game Elo ratings (poor test for intelligence but we'll ignore that), they do not follow a Gaussian distribution, even though Elo assumes a Gaussian distribution for game outcomes (but not the population). So that's good evidence that aptitude/skill in intellectua…
Lichess has public population data (they use a modified version of Glicko-2 which is basically an updated version of Elo's system): https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz It's basically a Gaussian with a very long right tail. Big caveat here is that these are the ratings of weekly active players. If we instead include casual players, I suspect we'd have something resembling a pareto distribution.
I have no idea why you would believe increasing the population would make this Gaussian distribution look Pareto, when the exact opposite is true - increasing populations make things look more Gaussian - in all natural circumstances.
> Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the company. Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms. Those terms are information asymmetry and…
TL;DR: Productivity–Pay Tracker: Change 1979q4–2024q1; Productivity +80.9%; Hourly pay: +29.4%; Productivity has grown 2.7x as much as pay
Also, if people are unfamiliar with economics term "productivity", it roughly corresponds to profit per employee, or better, return on equity (ROE).
> Performance management, as practiced in many large corporations in 2024, is an outdated technology that is in need of an update Author made a couple of fundamental mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the company. Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms. Those terms are information asymmetry and…
> The second mistake they made is assume that companies would prioritize being lean and trimming the mediocre & bottom 5%. There are other considerations, combined productivity is more important than having individual superstars working on the shiniest features. I'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about elsewhere – hiring is a goddamn mess right now. If I trim the bottom 5% of my org (in my case, 2-3 e…
From the view of senior management (and yours), would these layoffs adversely harm your business model or profitability? If the answer is no, then layoffs are probably the economically correct decision. (Of course, there are many other factors to consider.)
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Very interested point, this is a close corollary to the central limit theorem, no? Doesn't this assume a linear relationship between relevant alleles and the given trait though?
The missing assumptions are that the number of genes is large, independently distributed (i.e. no correlations among different genes), and identically distributed. And the whopper: that nurture has no impact. You can weaken some of those assumptions, but there are strong correlations amongst various genes, and between genes and nurture. And, one "nurture" variable is overwhelmingly correlated to many others: wealth.…
The nurture/nature relationship to IQ has been well-studied for many decades. There are easy and obvious ways to figure this out by looking at identical twins raised in different homes, adopted children and how much they resemble their birth parents vs adopted parents, etc. Idealists always like to drag out nurture effects on IQ like it's some kind of mystery when it's a well-studied and well-solved empirical question.